Quote:Facebook Moves 1.5 Billion Users' Data Out Of Europe To Circumvent New Privacy Law
After Zuck suggested (but stopping short of promising) during testimony before Congress last week that he would treat all Facebook users' data as if it fell under the European Union's new General Data Protection Regulation, Reuters and the Guardian are reporting that Facebook has quietly moved the data of more than 1.5 billion users out of reach of European privacy law by transferring it from the company's European headquarters in Ireland to its global headquarters in California.

Quote:Nova Scotia Arrests Teen Who Discovered Massive Government Data Breach
The teen, whose name has been withheld prior to arraignment, was unsatisfied with an answer he received after filling a Freedom of Information request related to a provincial teachers' dispute. He noticed, however, that the URL for the response ended in a long string of digits - and that by simply changing the number (adding or subtracting from it), he had access to other documents provided through similar FoI requests.

"I decided these are all transparency documents that the government is displaying. I decided to download all of them just to save," the teen told CBC News. "I didn't do anything to try to hide myself. I didn't think any of this would be wrong if it's all public information. Since it was public, I thought it was free to just download, to save," he added.

In response, he wrote a one-line program which grabbed approximately 7,000 public records in order to check them out - which led to the police raid in which authorities seized all the family's electronics - including the phone and computer his father uses for income.

Quote:Facebook Moves 1.5 Billion Users' Data Out Of Europe To Circumvent New Privacy Law
After Zuck suggested (but stopping short of promising) during testimony before Congress last week that he would treat all Facebook users' data as if it fell under the European Union's new General Data Protection Regulation, Reuters and the Guardian are reporting that Facebook has quietly moved the data of more than 1.5 billion users out of reach of European privacy law by transferring it from the company's European headquarters in Ireland to its global headquarters in California.

Quote:Nova Scotia Arrests Teen Who Discovered Massive Government Data Breach
The teen, whose name has been withheld prior to arraignment, was unsatisfied with an answer he received after filling a Freedom of Information request related to a provincial teachers' dispute. He noticed, however, that the URL for the response ended in a long string of digits - and that by simply changing the number (adding or subtracting from it), he had access to other documents provided through similar FoI requests.

"I decided these are all transparency documents that the government is displaying. I decided to download all of them just to save," the teen told CBC News. "I didn't do anything to try to hide myself. I didn't think any of this would be wrong if it's all public information. Since it was public, I thought it was free to just download, to save," he added.

In response, he wrote a one-line program which grabbed approximately 7,000 public records in order to check them out - which led to the police raid in which authorities seized all the family's electronics - including the phone and computer his father uses for income.

Visualizing The Multi-Billion Dollar Industry That Makes Its Living From Your Data

In the ocean ecosystem, plankton is the raw material that fuels an entire food chain. These tiny organisms on their own aren’t that remarkable, but en masse, they have a huge impact on the world.

Here on dry land, Visual Capitalist's Nick Routley notes that the massive volume of content and meta data we produce fuels a marketing research industry that is worth nearly $50 billion.

Every instant message, page click, and step you take now produces a data point that can be used to build a detailed profile of who you are.

EVERY BREATH YOU TAKE, EVERY MOVE YOU MAKE

The coarse-grained demographics and contact information of yesteryear seems quaint compared to today’s sophisticated data collection battleground. In the past, marketers would make judgement calls on your likely income and family structure based on where you lived, and you’d receive “targeted” mail and calls from telemarketers. Loyalty programs and the emergence of web analytics pushed things a little further.

Today, the steady march of technological advancement has created a vast data collection empire that measures every aspect of your digital life and, increasingly, your offline life as well. Facebook alone uses nearly one hundred data points to target ads to you – everything from your marital status to whether you’ve been on vacation lately or not. Telecoms have access to extremely detailed information on your location. Apple has biometric data.

Also watching your every move are web trackers. “Cookie-syncing” is one of the sneaky ways advertisers can follow you around the internet. Basically, cookie-syncing allows third parties to share browsing information at such a large scale that even the NSA “piggybacks” off them for surveillance purposes.

The recent sales growth of smart speakers will only increase the breadth of data companies collect and analyze. Amazon and Google have both filed patents for technology that would essentially allow them to mine audio recordings for keywords. Advertisers could potentially target you with diapers before your family and friends even know you’re expecting a baby.

FOLLOWING THE ONES AND ZEROS

While web trackers and companies like Apple and Google are collecting a lot of personal and behavioral data, it’s the whales of the data ecosystem – data brokers – who are creating increasingly detailed profiles on almost everyone.

The goal of data brokers, such as Experian or Acxiom, is to siphon up as much personal data as possible and apply it to profiles. This data comes from a wide variety of sources. Your purchases, financial history, internet activity, and even psychographic attributes are mixed with information from public records to create a robust dossier. Digital profiles are then sorted into one of thousands of categories to help optimize advertising efforts.

FEAR THE SHADOW PROFILE?

According to Pew Research, 91% of Americans “agree” or “strongly agree” that people have lost control over how personal information is collected and used.

Though optimizing clickthroughs is a big business, companies are increasingly moving beyond advertising to extract value from their growing data pipeline. Amalgamated data is increasingly being viewed as a clever way to assess risk in the decision-making process (e.g. hiring, insurance, loan or housing applications), and the stakes for consumers are going up in the process.

For example, a man may feel comfortable sharing their HIV status on Grindr (for practical reasons), but may not want that information going to a third party. (Unfortunately, that really happened.)

In 2015, Facebook filed a patent for a service that would help insurance companies vet people based on the credit ratings of their social network.

THE MORE YOU KNOW

Below the surface of our screens, our digital profiles continue to take shape.

Measures like adjusting website privacy controls and clearing cookies are a good start, but that’s only a fraction of the data companies are collecting. Not only do data brokers make it hard to officially opt out, their partnerships with corporations and advanced data collection methods cast such a wide net, that it’s almost impossible to exclude individual people.

Data brokers have operated with very little scrutiny or oversight, but that may be changing. Under intense public and governmental pressure, Facebook recently cut ties with data brokers. For a company that has bullishly pursued monetization of user data at every turn, the move is a sign that the public sentiment is changing.

So anyway ... anyone up for a rational, fact-based, and civil discussion about the topic?

It's funny when reality starts reading like a thread topic by Pirate News.

None of this is new. This is the shit I was "paranoid" about back as far as the early 2000's. But try explaining this stuff to the plebes that were just learning how to turn a computer on and off.

The only real difference today is that I don't really give a shit about it anymore. It's not that I take the stance that "if you're not doing anything wrong than you have nothing to worry about". It's that they've got 7 billion people to monitor and I'm just not that interesting.

One day I woke up and realized that I'm not the bright shining center of the universe.

None of this is new. This is the shit I was "paranoid" about back as far as the early 2000's. But try explaining this stuff to the plebes that were just learning how to turn a computer on and off.

The only real difference today is that I don't really give a shit about it anymore. It's not that I take the stance that "if you're not doing anything wrong than you have nothing to worry about". It's that they've got 7 billion people to monitor and I'm just not that interesting.

One day I woke up and realized that I'm not the bright shining center of the universe.

And it was liberating.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

It's too bad you weren't on the internet in the early 90's, right after algore invented it. That was real Freedom of information, before Billy & The Libs corralled it.

None of this is new. This is the shit I was "paranoid" about back as far as the early 2000's. But try explaining this stuff to the plebes that were just learning how to turn a computer on and off.

The only real difference today is that I don't really give a shit about it anymore. It's not that I take the stance that "if you're not doing anything wrong than you have nothing to worry about". It's that they've got 7 billion people to monitor and I'm just not that interesting.

One day I woke up and realized that I'm not the bright shining center of the universe.

And it was liberating.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

It's too bad you weren't on the internet in the early 90's, right after algore invented it. That was real Freedom of information, before Billy & The Libs corralled it.

Yeah... my first taste was in the late 90's. It was still pre-google by a few years though. I did manage to snag nearly every song I ever heard in my life off of Napster before it was shut down.

Not that this really matters anymore since music is practically free by legal means compared to the old format of paying full price for an album for the one or two songs you'd ever want to listen to. That hard drive died many years ago and I've never felt the need to re-download any of it.

The late 90's and early 2000's were great. I can only imagine the wild west frontier mentality of the early 90's.

None of this is new. This is the shit I was "paranoid" about back as far as the early 2000's. But try explaining this stuff to the plebes that were just learning how to turn a computer on and off.

The only real difference today is that I don't really give a shit about it anymore. It's not that I take the stance that "if you're not doing anything wrong than you have nothing to worry about". It's that they've got 7 billion people to monitor and I'm just not that interesting.

One day I woke up and realized that I'm not the bright shining center of the universe.

And it was liberating.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

But if, for some reason, the government does get an interest in you - and it doesn't need to be official, as Snowden revealed all you need to do is look like a new love interest that a jealous NSA-ex might snoop on - and the government has plenty of disparate bits of information they could weave into a story.

And it's not just the government. Due to severe in-built security issues, you, along with hundreds of millions of others, can be (and probably have been) mass-hacked in one gulp. Nobody needs to be interested in - and focused on - you, specifically and individually for you to be victimized.

And then, there's the loss of privacy to BUSINESS. Don't you think you deserve to be free of its snooping?

Just because you're not important doesn't mean you're not targeted.

So anyway ... anyone up for a rational, fact-based, and civil discussion about the topic?

Quote:Originally posted by 1kiki:
But if, for some reason, the government does get an interest in you - and it doesn't need to be official, as Snowden revealed all you need to do is look like a new love interest that a jealous NSA-ex might snoop on - and the government has plenty of disparate bits of information they could weave into a story.

And it's not just the government. Due to severe in-built security issues, you, along with hundreds of millions of others, can be (and probably have been) mass-hacked in one gulp. Nobody needs to be interested in - and focused on - you, specifically and individually for you to be victimized.

And then, there's the loss of privacy to BUSINESS. Don't you think you deserve to be free of its snooping?

Just because you're not important doesn't mean you're not targeted.

I don't agree with any of it. Sure, I'd like them to not be able to do it, but I don't see how that's ever going to be an option again.

Quite the contrary, I think that at some point, possibly even in our own lifetime, that we're going to be something close to a hive mind culture and that none of us are going to have the ability to have secrets from anybody else.

I think that will be terrifying at first, until we realize how fucked up everybody else is behind their masks.

Personally, I'm sure that somebody could absolutely destroy me if they wanted to with info on my internet history. I'm legitimately not even aware of 80% of the stuff that I've put out there when I was drunk. I've never once gone back into my history here to see what I've said.

I'm not going to live in fear about it though. I've never gone back and removed any posts even. I really don't give a shit.

I have no political aspirations. I've long since given up any childish notion that I can change the world. I have no wife and no kids. Outside of a few close people and my interactions with people at work, I'm perfectly fine with being a loner and I enjoy my own company.

I really don't see how or why anybody would target me. That's not to say that I haven't in the past or even continue to do things that somebody would have a problem with. It's just that I don't see any possible ROI on anybody's part to try to ruin my life. I'm completely harmless. I'm an aggressor against no one, and it would be a pretty tough job to try to take something away from somebody who thrives on almost nothing as it is.

Quote:Originally posted by 1kiki:
Well - we agree on one thing - we both don't like any of the surveillance, hacking, and snooping!

Absolutely. I can't really imagine anybody is actually for it. I just don't see how there is any way to avoid it.

I think it bothered a lot of people when they were told what I already knew about Facebook doing, but they'll go back to it if they haven't already. It's become a part of who they are.

Facebook will probably get a big symbolic slap on the wrist and a bunch of fines. That money will go God knows where... probably to fund some illegal wars or something, then Zuckerburg will be told to continue to do what he's doing behind closed doors, but there will be strings attached in the form of quite a bit of government oversight behind the scenes.

They'll believe they're being a lot more careful about it this time and won't foolishly show their hand in the future when using Facebook to spy on everyone... using it only as an initial means to put people on watch lists and then finding some other way to publicly out somebody for Thoughtcrimes without putting focus on Facebook.

But someday down the road somebody will figure that out too and it will be another huge scandal. Then the cycle will repeat and we'll be right back to where we are now talking about it and getting nothing done until everyone forgets about it again and goes back to indulging their narsissitic behavior on Facebook.

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